Using Elasticsearch in Grafana

Grafana ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch. You can do many types of simple or complex Elasticsearch queries to visualize logs or metrics stored in Elasticsearch. You can also annotate your graphs with log events stored in Elasticsearch.

Adding the data source

Open the side menu by clicking the Grafana icon in the top header.

In the side menu under the Dashboards link you should find a link named Data Sources.

Click the + Add data source button in the top header.

Select Elasticsearch from the Type dropdown.

NOTE: If you’re not seeing the Data Sources link in your side menu it means that your current user does not have the Admin role for the current organization.

Name

Description

Name

The data source name. This is how you refer to the data source in panels & queries.

Default

Default data source means that it will be pre-selected for new panels.

Url

The HTTP protocol, IP, and port of your Elasticsearch server.

Access

Server (default) = URL needs to be accessible from the Grafana backend/server, Browser = URL needs to be accessible from the browser.

Access mode controls how requests to the data source will be handled. Server should be the preferred way if nothing else stated.

Server access mode (Default)

All requests will be made from the browser to Grafana backend/server which in turn will forward the requests to the data source and by that circumvent possible Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) requirements. The URL needs to be accessible from the grafana backend/server if you select this access mode.

Browser (Direct) access

All requests will be made from the browser directly to the data source and may be subject to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) requirements. The URL needs to be accessible from the browser if you select this access mode.

If you select Browser access you must update your Elasticsearch configuration to allow other domains to access Elasticsearch from the browser. You do this by specifying these to options in your elasticsearch.yml config file.

http.cors.enabled: true
http.cors.allow-origin: "*"

Index settings

Here you can specify a default for the time field and specify the name of your Elasticsearch index. You can use a time pattern for the index name or a wildcard.

Elasticsearch version

Be sure to specify your Elasticsearch version in the version selection dropdown. This is very important as there are differences how queries are composed. Currently the versions available is 2.x, 5.x, 5.6+ or 6.0+. 5.6+ means a version of 5.6 or less than 6.0. 6.0+ means a version of 6.0 or higher, 6.3.2 for example.

Min time interval

A lower limit for the auto group by time interval. Recommended to be set to write frequency, for example 1m if your data is written every minute. This option can also be overridden/configured in a dashboard panel under data source options. It’s important to note that this value needs to be formatted as a number followed by a valid time identifier, e.g. 1m (1 minute) or 30s (30 seconds). The following time identifiers are supported:

Identifier

Description

y

year

M

month

w

week

d

day

h

hour

m

minute

s

second

ms

millisecond

Metric Query editor

The Elasticsearch query editor allows you to select multiple metrics and group by multiple terms or filters. Use the plus and minus icons to the right to add/remove metrics or group by clauses. Some metrics and group by clauses haves options, click the option text to expand the row to view and edit metric or group by options.

Series naming & alias patterns

You can control the name for time series via the Alias input field.

Pattern

Description

{{term fieldname}}

replaced with value of a term group by

{{metric}}

replaced with metric name (ex. Average, Min, Max)

{{field}}

replaced with the metric field name

Pipeline metrics

Some metric aggregations are called Pipeline aggregations, for example, Moving Average and Derivative. Elasticsearch pipeline metrics require another metric to be based on. Use the eye icon next to the metric to hide metrics from appearing in the graph. This is useful for metrics you only have in the query for use in a pipeline metric.

Templating

Instead of hard-coding things like server, application and sensor name in you metric queries you can use variables in their place. Variables are shown as dropdown select boxes at the top of the dashboard. These dropdowns makes it easy to change the data being displayed in your dashboard.

Checkout the Templating documentation for an introduction to the templating feature and the different types of template variables.

Query variable

The Elasticsearch data source supports two types of queries you can use in the Query field of Query variables. The query is written using a custom JSON string.

Query

Description

{“find”: “fields”, “type”: “keyword”}

Returns a list of field names with the index type keyword.

{“find”: “terms”, “field”: “@hostname”, “size”: 1000}

Returns a list of values for a field using term aggregation. Query will user current dashboard time range as time range for query.

{“find”: “terms”, “field”: “@hostname”, “query”: ‘’}

Returns a list of values for a field using term aggregation & and a specified lucene query filter. Query will use current dashboard time range as time range for query.

There is a default size limit of 500 on terms queries. Set the size property in your query to set a custom limit. You can use other variables inside the query. Example query definition for a variable named $host.

{"find": "terms", "field": "@hostname", "query": "@source:$source"}

In the above example, we use another variable named $source inside the query definition. Whenever you change, via the dropdown, the current value of the $source variable, it will trigger an update of the $host variable so it now only contains hostnames filtered by in this case the @source document property.

Using variables in queries

There are two syntaxes:

$<varname> Example: @hostname:$hostname

[[varname]] Example: @hostname:[[hostname]]

Why two ways? The first syntax is easier to read and write but does not allow you to use a variable in the middle of a word. When the Multi-value or Include all value options are enabled, Grafana converts the labels from plain text to a lucene compatible condition.

In the above example, we have a lucene query that filters documents based on the @hostname property using a variable named $hostname. It is also using a variable in the Terms group by field input box. This allows you to use a variable to quickly change how the data is grouped.

Annotations

Annotations allows you to overlay rich event information on top of graphs. You add annotation queries via the Dashboard menu / Annotations view. Grafana can query any Elasticsearch index for annotation events.

Name

Description

Query

You can leave the search query blank or specify a lucene query

Time

The name of the time field, needs to be date field.

Text

Event description field.

Tags

Optional field name to use for event tags (can be an array or a CSV string).

Configure the Datasource with Provisioning

It’s now possible to configure datasources using config files with Grafana’s provisioning system. You can read more about how it works and all the settings you can set for datasources on the provisioning docs page